Sony Music and Warner Chappell need Anthropic to pay up.
The publishing corporations filed a lawsuit towards Anthropic in a Northern California district courtroom on Friday. Anthropic cofounders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann have been additionally named within the submitting.
“Defendants Anthropic and its founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann have carried out a brazen marketing campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on an enormous scale with a view to develop, function, and reap monumental income from Anthropic’s ‘Claude’ sequence of synthetic intelligence (‘AI’) fashions,” the businesses stated within the criticism.
Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell Music stated Anthropic collected “1000’s upon 1000’s” of copyrighted songs, together with 80s anthem “Eye of the Tiger,” Marvin Gaye’s “Ain’t No Mountain Excessive Sufficient,” Mariah Carey’s “All I Need for Christmas is You,” and Taylor Swift’s “Paper Rings.”
Within the lawsuit, the publishing corporations stated Anthropic has pirated their copyrighted works by a variety of strategies, together with two digital archives, Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. In June 2025, a choose dominated that Anthropic downloaded over 7 million pirated books to coach Claude.
“Among the many many tens of millions of books that Defendants torrented from these unlawful pirate web sites have been books containing the lyrics and sheet music to tons of or extra of Music Publishers’ copyrighted musical compositions, recognized in Exhibit A. These works embody ‘Livin’ On a Prayer,’ ‘September,’ ‘Nice Balls of Fireplace,’ ‘Ramblin’ Man,’ and ‘Hallelujah,'” the lawsuit says.
Consequently, Claude models generate an identical or near-identical copies of the copyrighted work of their responses to customers, the businesses alleged. Within the lawsuit, the businesses stated coaching Claude on copyrighted content material permits it to supply AI-generated lyrics that can in the end compete with human-made songs.
Sony Music and Warner Chappell requested a jury trial. They’re searching for statutory damages from Anthropic, together with as much as $150,000 for every composition it used to coach Claude.
“Even essentially the most revolutionary of applied sciences should develop inside the bounds of the legislation, and Anthropic’s Claude fashions aren’t any completely different,” the businesses stated within the criticism.
The AI trade has been focused by a slew of copyright lawsuits since giant language fashions like Claude and ChatGPT started to remodel society.
Tech corporations want troves of information to coach their AI fashions, and go to nice lengths to amass it. Most lately, historians and archivists have accused AI corporations of buying giant numbers of vintage books and feeding them into their LLMs, destroying them within the course of.
Final September, Anthropic agreed to pay over $1.5 billion to authors to settle a class-action lawsuit associated to pirated works. OpenAI, too, has confronted several copyright lawsuits in recent times, together with one from The New York Instances and one other from Encyclopedia Britannica.